Customer contact centers provide an important interface for customers/partners of an organization to contact the organization. The contact can be for a request for a product or service, for trouble reporting, service request, etc. The contact mechanism in a conventional call center is via a telephone, but it could be via a number of other electronic channels, including e-mail, online chat, etc.
The contact center consists of a number of human agents, each assigned to a telecommunication device, such as a phone or a computer for conducting email or Internet chat sessions, which is connected to a central switch. Using these devices, the agents generally provide sales, customer service, or technical support to the customers or prospective customers of a contact center, or of a contact center's clients. Conventionally, a contact center operation includes a switch system that connects callers to agents. In an inbound contact center, these switches route inbound callers to a particular agent in a contact center, or, if multiple contact centers are deployed, to a particular contact center for further routing. When a call is received at a contact center (which can be physically distributed, e.g., the agents may or may not be in a single physical location), if a call is not answered immediately, the switch will typically place the caller on hold and then route the caller to the next agent that becomes available. This is sometimes referred to as placing the caller in a call queue.
Being placed on hold for more than a few seconds can be an unpleasant and frustrating experience for many people. As a consequence, a significant number of inbound callers who are put on hold for more than a brief time up abandon their calls and hang up. In some cases, depending on the call center's communication system, before abandoning the call the caller may leave a message requesting a call-back. Many call centers maintain call-back systems to returned abandoned calls and such systems often place such callers in a queue for call-back by a call center agent. In conventional methods of agent call-backs to abandoned callers, high business value callers may not receive a call-back for an extended period of time, while the low business value calls often receive call-backs more promptly, possibly causing additional dissatisfaction on the part of the high business value caller.
There is a need for a system and method for identifying high business value inbound callers at a call center that have left a message requesting a call-back. There is a related need for a system and method for identifying high business value inbound callers at a call center as to those inbound callers that have abandoned an inbound call. Additionally, there is a need to improve traditional methods of arranging call-backs to inbound callers who have abandoned a call to improve allocation of limited call center resources to high business value callers.